Designing an Assignment with a Faculty Member

So, I am just tickled pink because I am working with a professor on designing an assignment for the first time. This all came out of a grant-based project where we are partnered with a professor to rework their class and syllabus to be "textbook free." I was asked to help a professor that I was already acquainted with pretty well in the Spanish department with her winning grant. Her class was a film course about Latin American film. We worked all summer on the project and replaced her textbooks with a number of articles and an open-access book on writing about film. It went really well, and I felt like it was a job well done.

The best part was that 50 people signed up for the class. No more than 25 had ever signed up for it before, but the added bonus of having no textbook and the fact that it satisfies a university requirement really spoke to the students. It helped that the academic advisors were sold on it, too.
The professor came to me later and asked for help--she had a conflict for two of her classes during one of the weeks of the semester because she has to be at a conference. Could I help by covering the two classes? I knew her syllabus inside and out.

Suffice it to say that I was really excited. This is the stuff librarians dream about happening, right? It also dovetails with all of my interests in active learning and foreign languages, and my recent work with the Don't Cancel That Class initiative. I was sold.

We have met numerous times and what we have planned is pretty neat because it combines library instruction and a massive active learning exercise. On the first day, I will go to their classroom and provide library instruction. I am kind of reverse engineering the instruction, in that we made an active learning exercise first--she's calling it a scavenger hunt, but it is more of an assignment. They will complete it in class. They first will do our Snap6 iPad app, which allows students to use the iPad to take 6 pictures throughout the building. This satisfies learning outcomes for students to get help from a librarian, find a book on the shelf, and more. They will then complete a written assignment that allows them to search a database in a hands-on way, determine whether material is a primary or secondary source, and determine the type of source something is from looking at a citation in MLA style. Each class lasts 1 hour and 15 minutes, so I have these students for nearly 3 hours total of library instruction.

In addition to searching WorldCat and MLA International Bibliography, the students will have to do a lot of hands-on library work. Here are some of the parts of the assignment that I thought I would share (these are the parts I helped design by writing the questions and locating materials, etc.).

1    Question: Based on the citation below, identify the type of source it represents.                        (3x1 = 3 pts)

Book

Journal Article

Newspaper Article

Film

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Examples:

Borge, Jason. Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2008.

 

Bustamante, Jayro, director. Ixcanul. Las Casa de Production, 2015.

1. Primary/Secondary Analysis                                                                            (2x5 = 10 pts)

 Note: each packet will contain a novel or a movie and a scholarly book or an article.

Directions: Pick up one of the packets at the front of the room. Answer the following questions by looking at the materials.

Item Number 1.

a)      What is the title? _____________________________________________________

b)      Who is the author/director of this item? ___________________________________

c)      When was it published or created? ________________________________________

d)      Is this a primary or secondary source?      Primary     Secondary   

e)      Why? Explain briefly.

Item Number 2.

f)       What is the title? _____________________________________________________

g)      Who is the author/director of this item? ___________________________________

h)      When was it published or created? ________________________________________

i)        Is this a primary or secondary source?      Primary     Secondary   

j)        Why? Explain briefly.